On Mondays during the NHL lockout, Sporting News will present radical—and, in most cases improbable—proposals designed to get the league back on track and ensure its long-term health. The fourth in that series: embracing gambling as a revenue stream.

With so many players heading for Europe during the NHL lockout, hockey fans who want to follow their favorites are scouring the Internet, checking out sports pages from across the Atlantic to find out just what is going on in all of those leagues that are actually playing games.

One headline from this weekend wasn't about hockey, but it should have reminded anyone who read it of the toughness that is so treasured on the ice. On Saturday in England, the Leeds Rhinos topped the Warrington Wolves, 26-18, to win the championship of rugby’s Super League. In the defeat, Warrington’s Paul Wood suffered a ruptured testicle as the result of a wayward knee from a Leeds player, early in the second half. Wood stayed in the game until the end, did some postgame interviews with reporters without disclosing his injury, then went to the hospital and had surgery to remove the testicle.

It’s too bad that the Super League's season is over, because with players as rugged as Wood, it would make a nice satellite-TV treat while the NHL is gone. Still, the Grand Final made for some interesting reading, as it turns out that Leeds stood as an 18-1 longshot for the championship before rolling through the playoffs, LA Kings-style. By the time the Grand Final rolled around, Leeds was a 7-4 shot, while Warrington was a 1-2 favorite.

Those odds come from the Leeds website, which also posted props for the Harry Sunderland Trophy MVP, and for the game’s first scorer. These kind of odds commonly wind up in North American newspapers at Super Bowl time, but you sure didn’t see them on the Giants’ or Patriots’ websites in February.

Elsewhere in the world, betting on sports isn’t just commonplace, it’s part of the way that money is made. Tuesday’s big game in German handball is Rhein Neckar Lowen against SG Flensburg-Handewitt, with Rhein a slight favorite according to bet-at-home.com, the website whose name appears on Flensburg-Handewitt’s jerseys, and which can be accessed with a click of their logo on the Flensburg-Handewitt website.

It isn’t just teams who cash in on betting—the Australian Football League, National Rugby League, Tennis Australia, PGA of Australia and Cricket Australia all allow their logos to be used on the website of “Approved sports betting operator” Luxbet, also the official bookie of the South Sydney Rabbitohs, the rugby team co-owned by Russell Crowe.

Back in the Northern Hemisphere, soccer stadia in England have betting windows in the concourses, taking wagers on the game where they are, and other action around the league. There also are smartphone apps, meaning that the betting window isn’t even necessary. Lose that bet on the first goal scorer? Try again with the first goal of the second half! How much fun would it be if NHL playoff overtime goal predictions had odds attached, and a better payoff than being retweeted by John Buccigross?

If only the pesky laws of North America weren’t in the way, the NHL and other leagues here could benefit greatly from opening the doors to well-regulated gambling. As it stands now, fans who want to place bets are able to do so because illicit options always exist in the absence of legal avenues to vice, from a guy in the neighborhood who will take a bet (and maybe your thumbs), to a buddy who lives in Las Vegas, to the internet.

It's not as if the NHL is averse to the idea of being associated with gambling. The 50/50 raffle is a nearly leaguewide staple in which fans willingly part with their money for a longshot chance at a big pot. The NHL, like every other sports league on this continent, also makes a big deal about promoting fantasy games, and if anyone thinks those are a wagering-free endeavor because they do not have entrance fees, they need to get out more—perhaps a walk down to the corner store would do. Please be sure to pick up an NHL team-branded scratch ticket while you’re there.

Gambling is ingrained in sports, but actually betting on games is a no-no here because of the Black Sox throwing the World Series in 1919, and the 1951 point-shaving antics that turned City College in New York from an early national basketball powerhouse to a trivia answer. Sports gambling may have been swept under the rug as a conversation topic, but it never went away. It was hardly a coincidence that the NFL’s referee lockout ended after a blown call affected not only the result of a game between the Packers and Seahawks, but the point spread as well.

People are going to bet on sports no matter what governments and leagues do, so governments and leagues would do well to get in on the great moneymaking apparatus that they currently shun. That, however, may be starting to change—at least from the government side of things.

New Jersey governor Chris Christie has all but dared sports leagues and the federal government to stop him from allowing sports wagering at the Garden State’s racetracks and casinos. In August, the NHL was part of the lawsuit, along with Major League Baseball, the NBA, NFL and NCAA, trying to do just that. The horse racing industry is siding with New Jersey in the case, which had court filings last week.

Instead of trying to set up roadblocks, the NHL and all of the other sports would be much better served by working with New Jersey to set up a system in which they can get in on the action, rather than shuttering a multibillion-dollar industry and making fans look overseas for it. Sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it?